N and I are sick, and after an intense day of entertaining Klara, all we can do is watch a Netflix series. We found a really calm one where nothing happens. It’s titled Virgin River, and it’s very non-woke.
It’s still very neoliberal, though. The characters’ neoliberal worldview is presented as utterly normal and commonsensical when in reality it’s nothing short of insane.
“I was never that serious about our relationship,” says a man who’s pushing 50 about the woman he’s been with for two years and who’s pregnant with his twins. “This was supposed to be just casual. I’m not in love with her.” This man is a positive character, the hero of the series. Viewers are expected to take in stride his assertion that a two-year relationship that culminated in a pregnancy is “not that serious”.
The show’s heroine starts a romantic relationship with this man while he’s expecting children with another woman, and again we are supposed to accept this as normal. We all know that in actual reality only the generationally unemployed meth addicts behave this way but in the show it’s the educated, propertied middle classes that exist in this relational messiness.
This worldview not only doesn’t lead to happiness, it also doesn’t result in accumulation of wealth. Flittering about in search of new loves and leaving behind a slew of broken relationships and unwanted children, is a recipe for poverty. We receive the message that this is the only normal way to live from every electrical appliance and every gadget, and it’s the most impoverishing worldview, both economically and emotionally, that anybody can imagine.
Clarissa's Blog 
I’ve watched a few seasons of this show and never thought about that.
The town it takes place in is full of very traditional kinds of community celebrations, deep friendships, and then weird crime/drug things at the fringes. The people seem to magically do well financially. It’s charming make believe plus these incongruities. There would be no drama without them.
Amanda
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Get better soon, I’ll pray for you two
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Yay alternate TV-reality where everyone is independently wealthy, but works a regular job anyway just to feel normal or something.
This must be related to the genre of pop fantasy literature I think of as “Single and childless in NYC” where everybody is young and bisexual except for the people who are really, really gay, nobody has kids, everybody works in a coffee shop, a used book store, or in off-broadway theater, and nobody ever worries about how they’re gonna pay their rent.
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